On Tuesday 27th October we held the launch for the Haunt anthology at the Royal Pump Room Museum in Harrogate. With a large audience in attendance Steve introduced the project, talking about the background to the idea. This was followed by readings of the work in the anthology from Steve, Becky, Jem Henderson, Richard Harries and Nick Stirk.

(Photos courtesy of Emma MacEwan)

We’re very grateful for the support from Harrogate Museums that has seen work from Haunt included in the Harrogate Stories exhibition, and enabled us to launch the anthology in a building so synonymous with Harrogate’s spatown.

During the performance we also showcased the photographs taken by Paul Floyd Blake for Haunt. These played behind the writers while they read, creating powerful juxtapositions with the poems and prose.

Paul Floyd Blake’s Haunt photos are currently on show at Bean and Bud in Harrogate.

The next event is on the 11th November in York. Steve and Becky will be performing work from Haunt at Speaker’s Corner in York, the regular spoken word night at The Golden Ball. Entry is £1, with open mic slots available.

In a town of white orange tick tock clockwork people,
in among Stray-side green yellow chalybeate sulphur fed succulence opulence,
where skag-addled junk crews ferry deals across the darker areas of town ,
and purple yellow white flowers peek up from ice-crusted drop points under giant looming elm trees,
haunted gaunted hippies waiting for the next big fix,
poverty and speed and endless nights their only source of nutrition,
where one million pound mansions press up next to dole scum queues that lounge under shaded avenues,
where Bilton churches hand out the only warmth and fuel in town, the fires of damnation banked up to keep these paupers warm,
who laugh and shit and cry in mould old stone bedsits, three to a room,
where youth is stamped down by the foot of depression and disability, forever young, untold fractures of fragile minds,
causing nightmares, shivers, DTs, the uncomfortable on the nod gouch in a lonely magnolia hell of their own,
brains full of the nonstop jabber of a lonely schizo on the bus home,
to tell his head friends that at least he spoke to someone that day.
From Broadacre backstreet fighting and gangs, forgotten penury in the town of the rich,
to Duchy Road, the elephant graveyard of the rich old fucks of Yorkshire,
who’d rather feather their nest eggs than even see those around them too hungry to even ask for handout,
not here in Harrogate.
Still a queer odd strange Dickensian nightmare.